Ideas
Feature request(s): BLOX admin enhancements
We'd love for y'all to consider a more intuitive BLOX interface (selfishly speaking b/c I"m sure our workflow is different from others) …
-- the ability to search for a story, drop it into a block and re-order the items in the block w/o having to open multiple tabs/individual blocks.
-- Also, could related stories we drag into an asset show up in a related box underneath the centerpiece when the asset is put in that block? Right now we have to manually define centerpiece related stories.
-- Would also be helpful to 'link' block to one another so a story can seamlessly flow from one block to another on a page.
Right now when we change centerpiece story, for example, we have to change the CP, then move that CP'd story -- which is still being widely-read -- into another prominent block on the page.
We would use these features VERY often.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Just a few tips from me:
For item 1, I think you need to set up your rules for your blocks in a way that the ordering is more automated. Sometimes it does it get tricky, I often go through and change display priorities, but I have a general idea of where a story is going to fall based on its priority and time of publication because of sorting rules.
For item 2, most blocks have "additional content" under the appearance tab. You can turn on sibling assets to show there. It's just a list of links, so maybe you want something more significant, but we were thrilled to have this feature permanently added (we had it in a custom block previously). You can see this on our site (columbiamissourian.com)
For item 3, we "flag" our centerpiece stories with a featured flag. When a more recent featured flag story publishes, the older one drops into another block on the homepage. That block is set to look for stories with a featured flag but skip the first one and drop out anything more than 48 hours old. It works pretty seamlessly for us. The biggest trick is making sure the two blocks have identical rules and the only change is what number asset the block is looking for. You can take a look at our site. The centerpiece should be obvious and then the "old" featured stories drop down near the bottom before the photo galleries.
did NOT know about the 'additional content' feature. Thanks!
I've just not been able to wrap my head around display priorities. Our homepage centerpiece and top stories modules have obscure query rules that purposely don't pull in any content. And we pin everything from there.
We had a field similar to display priority on our previous CMS, which helped in our transition. I also ignored the recommendations of TownNews and went with lowest priority first. It was how we had always used priorities, and it just wasn't something I could re-teach.
We also do a lot of scheduled content and don't want to deal with manually pinning and unpinning items at 6 a.m. for example. Flags and keywords help us populate blocks that we need to control more closely but without pinning.
lowest priority appears at the top of a list?
Yes, that is how I set up the sorting rules on our blocks. The downside is that no priority is treated as a 0 and goes to the top. But I've strictly enforced the always put in a display priority in our newsroom.